I'm used to seeing nonsense on this heyah in-tar-web thing, but sometimes I stumble across something that strikes me as... special, yeah. Call it special.

One such type of special is the blogger Stock, who calls his blog Nuke Professional. His latest post is supposedly about "understanding cesium".

How does he go about understanding it? He starts "With all the big numbers, scientific notation, various ways of expressing radiation units that the pro-radiation stakeholders use to confuse people...." The various radiation units are products of history and the essential physics, and scientific notation was invented to make both large and small numbers easier to keep track of and understand. If the public doesn't follow them, the scientific community isn't at fault: they recommend that everyone learn some science, and can't be blamed if they don't.

From all appearances, Stock goes out of his way to prove that he doesn't understand big numbers, small numbers, and orders of magnitude. Take the obfuscatory incredulousness about 4 trillion Bq of Cs-137 supposedly stirred up along with dust at F. Dai'ichi. He expresses disbelief that the quantity of radio-cesium could be as small as 1.25 grams. If you were a professional, wouldn't your first question be about the actual concentration of Cs-137 in said dust?

Stock professes to read ENEnews, and my first search on the terms "cesium dust fukushima" turned up an ENEnews page claiming "over 200,000 Bq/kg" in dust from the site. That's 2.0*105 Bq/kg, for all you evil scientific-notation users out there.
4 trillion Bq becomes 4*1012 Bq in the radiation scientists' secret code. If we use the arithmetic trick called division, we can do this:
4*1012 Bq dispersed / 2.0*105 Bq/kg dust = 2*107 kg dust dispersed.
That 1.25 grams of Cs-137 appears to have been distributed amongst on the order of twenty MILLION kilograms (twenty thousand metric tons) of dust. The radioactive material was a very small fraction (about 60 parts per trillion) of a rather large total mass. And I got all of this from a source that he cites with apparent approval.

Stock writes this:

slightly more than 1/3 of ONE GRAM of cesium 137, deposited across a square mile of land as a smoke or gas, is enough to render that land uninhabitable for decades.

Is that correct? Cs-137 has an activity of 88 curies per gram, so 1/3 gram (about 29 Ci) per square km is 29 μCi/m² or about 1 million Bq/m². How much actual radiation would that expose you to? Let's haul out another virtual envelope:

Assume that a human standing on this contaminated ground covers an area of 1/10 square meter. Half the radiation goes straight down, half goes straight up. The beta radiation from Cs-137 is blocked by the soles of the shoes, but all the gamma radiation from the decay of Ba-137m is absorbed. That's 1 million decays per square meter, times 0.5 going upward, times 1/10 square meter: 50,000 gammas per second absorbed. The absorbed energy is 5*104 events/sec * 6.62*105 eV/event = 3.31*1010 eV/sec = 5.3*10-9 J/sec = 1.9*10-5 J/hr. For a body weight of 50 kg, this is an absorbed dose of 0.95 microJoules per kg per hour, or 0.95 μGrays (roughly μSv).

Unless I've slipped a decimal place, that's not even 9 milliSieverts (mSv) per year. That's less than people in Colorado average from groundshine, cosmic rays, and radon. If that land was uninhabitable, Colorado is uninhabitable. Such an assertion is as insane as the claim (made in all apparent seriousness by a certain Canadian who I believe I read lives on disability) that California is a wasteland.

That land would not only be safe to live on; it would be safe at ten times the Cs-137 concentration, or 50. And were it spiced up to 1000 times, it would not be long before rainwater washed the cesium down through the soil and reduced the surface exposure levels back to something quite tolerable. That very process is going on right now in Fukushima prefecture; radiation levels are falling much faster than the radioisotopes decay, and areas are being cleared for habitation even at Japan's hypochondriacally low standards for safety.

So, uninhabitable for decades? I don't think so. And I'm pondering a Kickstarter campaign to go live in Fukushima prefecture for a year to prove it. A year of sake, sushi and blogging. Who could ask for more?
¶ 8/05/2014 08:16:00 PM

You'll probably classify me as a "troll," but since you claim to like a good joust, I thought I would attempt to add a bit of information to go along with your effort to convince people that tiny doses of radiation should be causes for fear and costly evacuations.

People should understand the lack of hazard that comes when exposed to low levels of radiation - which are defined to be something less than 700 mSv/year -- as long as any individual exposure does not exceed 100 mSv.

There might be some who consider that an annual dose rate from Cs-137 that was released 3 years ago from a nuclear reactor accident exceeding 1 mSv/year renders land "uninhabitable," but that is an absurd position. Those people apparently overlook the fact that there are places around the world that have been inhabited by people for thousands of years where the natural background radiation can be as high as 250 mSv/year in hot spots and where people are often exposed to 30 mSv/year.

Human bodies have no way of telling if an alpha, beta or gamma comes from a "natural" or "manmade" source, but some governmental regulators behave as if we can and should treat manmade sources of radiation as uniquely hazardous.

I won't provide links on this first comment on your site, but I would be happy to do so in future posts if invited to do so. (I understand how links are often indicators of spam.)

When I commented on your post Understanding cesium, Blogger inserted an entry under "Links to this post" pointing back here. That link disappeared shortly thereafter, and remains AWOL. Would you care to explain?

Also, I commented on that post. Not only has that comment failed to appear, the comment count has mysteriously gone from the 21 it was previously down to 19. Again, would you care to explain?

When one has waited several days for a moderator to approve a comment, one notices other things as well. I also noticed the "Links to this post" section which briefly had a link to this, then went empty again.

You are quite free to correct any errors in my facts or arithmetic. If I went wrong, show me where.

Worst affected areas around Fukushima are under about 2 mSv/day. This is in the range of hormetic effects - its beneficial to health.

So quite contrary to the scaremongers, the net effect of this Fukushima cesium is most definately positive to people's health. Delaying the return of evacuated people deprives them of health benefits provided by the cesium.

All those people, evactuated for no reason. The iodine-131 is long gone, they should all be allowed to return, even into the areas of 2 mSv/day of Cs-134/137 radiation.

People actually live in 730 mSv/year background radiation levels, in some rare places like Ramsar, Iran. These people have lower incidence of cancer and longer life expectancy than the rest of the country. Odd isn't it.

You're really wrong about the internal dose rate, though. Cesium spends only a few months in the body, it does not bioaccumulate. So it is 99.9% external gamma emitter, even if you make a habit of eating it. If you do, you will quickly be poisoned by eating that much soil. Really not good for you to eat tonnes of soil. Bad for teeth as well. But not for radiation sake. The radiation in Ramsar, Iran should be much more dangerous, since much of it is from bio accumulating volatiles and gasses (uranium and thorium daughters). Oddly enough there's no bad health effect, neither cancer nor life expectancy.

Stock, I provided you with ample reference material. You provided me with only hollow statements, not a single reference to back up any of your claims. Please provide references to your claims on strontium dose rates in Fukushima, your arithmetic calculations on equilibrium internal dose from cesium, or good references providing this, and the age corrected deformations and such in Ramsar Iran. Authoritative sources only - terrorist scare organisations like Greenpeace do not count as references.

The samples have between 0.01 to 1 Bq/g of radiostrontium, which is a negligible amount. For example, granite contains many naturally occuring radionuclides such as uranium, thorium, potassium-40. Typical granite has more of those natural radionuclides than the highest measured radiostrontium samples (1 Bq/g).

That's exactly what causes the dose rate, actually. If you knew more about nuclear science than swear words, you'd know that the dose from granite comes from volatiles and gasses, such as radon and other daughters. These get volatilized from the granite and enter your lungs.

So, yes, to be pedantic, people are inhaling radionuclides from granite. Strontium isn't volatile, so you won't inhale it if its lying on the soil.

"Poor little Cyril, thinking that she has even won a single "argument"

So far E-P and I have won every single argument. However, it is quite amusing to see how deep you are in your little hole to not be able to see even simple semantics and reasoning. It appears that the word "nuclear" flips your switch, incapacitating all rational thought and scientific method. This is typical - you're a dime a dozen Stock. Disappointing.

"I just went to this Stock guys' blog. He's clearly no nuclear professional in any way. He doesn't understand dose factors or the difference in alpha and gamma (Q factors etc.)."

Over at Atomic Insights, he claimed that his education is in mechanical engineering, with "4000 hours of training" in radiation and whatnot. This is a long way from biology and health physics, let alone laboratory or epidemiological research. Over years of watching certain engineering types argue for positions not supported by data, I've noticed a tendency toward adherence to certain positions as immutable revealed truth, not unlike fundamentalism. Mr. Stock here has that in spades. (I don't, as anyone who's watched my position on MSRs, wind power and several other things be changed by data must affirm.)

"He also keeps changing the subject when I destroy his feeble arguments."

True to type for both Greens and climate-change denialists. His refusal to acknowledge his critics is also typical; you'll notice that he found this post somehow, but the "Links to this post" section under "Understanding cesium" has been blank since shortly after I posted this and remains so. HE wants to follow his critics, but he doesn't want his readers doing so. They might learn something he doesn't want them to learn.

Here is the comment I posted at his blog, which he hasn't seen fit to publish yet:

You're still pushing the "5 prompt radiation fatalities at Fukushima" lie. Not even the anti-nuclear activists at Wikipedia take this seriously. This so-called "proof" is a staffer's list reconstructed from hand-written notes made during a daily conference call with Japan. Errors due to the language barrier and simple mis-hearing (Feintuch hearing what his boss Jaczko wanted him to hear) are likely. This error was corrected literally years ago. So why are you pushing the falsehood to this day?

Failing to correct such a gross error of fact is both dishonest and UNPROFESSIONAL.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to find climate-change denialism here. It is another "smoking gun" connection between anti-nuclear activism and the fossil fuel interests. They are getting worried, and rightly so. When even the oil sheikhdoms of the Gulf of Arabia are ordering whole fleets of nuclear reactors, the public is starting to wonder if oil and gas aren't as abundant as the towel-heads want them to believe. Actions speak louder than words.

"So far E-P and I have won every single argument. However, it is quite amusing to see how deep you are in your little hole to not be able to see even simple semantics and reasoning."

The current mode on the left is to rate the winner by political correctness (adherence to dogma) and vitriol; facts and reason are out of fashion. By his own rubric, he is winning. His metrics are FUBAR, but that doesn't matter to him.

It's most amusing that Mr. Stock thinks he is removing noble gases with a reverse osmosis filter. Noble gases are neutral species and among the smallest also; they go through tiny pores very well. He'll sustain no harm from this, which is a pity; if ignorance was painful we might start making headway against it.

If we dissect the narrative, first you destroy Stock's hysteria of cesium by simply arithmatic which Stock has not responded to. In stead, Stock's response is "LOL scientists pushing for more radiation, how sad is that". This is like saying LOL scientists pushing for more muscle damage via sports excercise, how sad is that. That's exactly what the science is telling us! It's also beside the point that he was completely wrong in his hysteric cesium story. So stock changes the subject, with a lie no less.

Next Stock has a further diversionary tactic with the donate me thing. He uses this to make a snide remark which is even further from the topic and numbers at hand.

Next Stock talks a bit about some supposed conspiracy from the nuclear industry. Not related to the topic either.

Already Stock has changed the subject 3 times in a single post.

Next Stock makes an insult about EPs IQ being below 100, which clearly can't be the case if you read E-P's blog. Nor is it relevant, again, to the numbers and arguments.

Next, I step in to point out that up to 2 mSv/day is not a bad health effect dose, proven by various human, dog, and fruit fly exposures. Stock responds by saying that if cesium in the grass and soil is somehow eaten constantly, the equilibrium amount is very high. Which isn't the case, since the ratio of biological half life to radiological half life is so small, even the equilibrium from constant ingestion is small. I pointed out that one would be killed by eating that much soil before any radiological effect would occur.

Next Stock says that internal gamma has a dose rate conversion factor of 20. That's not correct; 20 is the conversion factor for internal alpha. Cesium and barium are not alpha sources. So the factor is not 20, but 1. This shows a fundamental lack of knowledge on basic nuclear health physics. I then show that even if a factor of 20 is used the dose rate does not change much because of the short biological half life.

Then Stock makes a comment on strontium. I find a reference on strontium samples showing the strontium concentration to be below typical granite levels of naturally occuring radionuclides. Stocks' response: I used the gram rather than kg, even though everyone knows that concentration is not subject to mass. Its already relative. The argument is the same whether we say 1 Bq/g strontium vs 1 Bq/g natural in granite or whether we say 1000 Bq/kg strontium vs 1000 Bq/kg granite. Stock also argues that the reference I gave said there wasn't much data on strontium. Which is the reason the researchers went out to find samples!!!! if there were much data the researchers need not have started the sampling.

Stock then realizes he's lost the argument so he says I'm talking about granite countertops. If you press CTRL+F you will find that I have never mentioned that word before this post!!

Stock goes on talking about blue pills and red pills and generally swearing and insulating both EP and me, without any argument.

At the end of this crazy joyride, Stock actually has the nerve to say we are changing the topic. He has not ONCE stayed on topic and has not ONCE won a numerical argument or provided even ONE reference, despite clearly being asked for this.

However there is value in Stock's responses, as ridiculous as they've been.

You see, the merit of an idea can be judged by its detractors. Stock is a nuclear detractor; in fact he's on a burn-witch hunt to burn nuclear plants no matter what the cost. But his arguments are non-existent. He's not rebutted a single numerical argument we've provided. So again we are strengthened in our idea - that nuclear power is a good thing.

Aloha Cyril, I find it amusing that misread the purpose of the W(r) weighting factor of gamma, saying that gamma is "only 1". Gamma set the definition at 1.Alpha is weak outside the body but very powerful inside the body. Gamma penetrates well in either case, however you are pretending that an internal dose of gamma is no different than if the gamma is outside. Cesium concentrates in muscles and the same amount of cesium inside the body compared to outside would be a boatload more damage due to the effect of multiple attacks on the same area.

Same with strontium which is a beta, and collects particularly in the bones. Of course internal is FAR worse than external.

Suggesting that 730 mSv a year is OK for the Japanese, even though that is 3 times higher than the max career dose for nuke workers, who are paid for their risk....is in fact a crime against humanity, you should be ashamed.

@EP boy you are a sneaky one just changing my statements, in a weak straw man.

I said that I have a water softener and RO to remove radium from water.

Apparently Illinois DOH is "wrong"

A number of treatment methods are available to remove radium from water. Ion exchange, lime softening, and reverse osmosis are the most common and can remove up to 90 percent of radium present. Ion exchange (i.e. water softeners) can often remove 90 percent of radium present along with water hardness. For some people, an undesired effect of ion exchange is the addition of sodium to the treated water. Those on low sodium (salt) diets should consider this before installing a softener. Reverse osmosis does not add sodium to the water.

"I find it amusing that misread the purpose of the W(r) weighting factor of gamma, saying that gamma is "only 1". Gamma set the definition at 1."

You suggested a factor of 20 which is incorrect. The factor for gamma is 1, it is always 1, inside or outside the body. Gamma rays are so penetrating that most will pass through or are evenly distributed through the body. It is therefore of little consequence whether the source is under your feet (soil) or in your feet (muscle). But now Stock is once again arguing over definitions in a diversionary attempt to distract from his gross error of a factor of 20 exaggeration.

"Alpha is weak outside the body but very powerful inside the body."

Yes, and neither cesium nor strontium makes alphas. So you lose again, again trying diversionary tactics rather than admitting you were wrong and you did not understand (or chose to mislead others) the difference between alpha and gamma Q factor.

" Cesium concentrates in muscles and the same amount of cesium inside the body compared to outside would be a boatload more damage due to the effect of multiple attacks on the same area. "

Wrong again, cesium is diluted by the muscles. The concentration in the cesium that you are eating, if you like eating soil all day, is greater than the concentration in the muscle. The muscle effectively dilutes the dose over a large and radiation resistant muscle tissue, for the few months it takes for the cesium atoms to pass through the body the ahum, normal way, you know.

"Same with strontium which is a beta, and collects particularly in the bones. Of course internal is FAR worse than external."

Yes, from the reference I gave you, and you clearly misread, strontium is about 10x as dangerous. Fortunately it is also non volatile so the amount of strontium is also 1000 to 100000 times less than the cesium contamination, as proven by the samples. Real scientists getting real samples and doing real tests on them. As opposed to say, some nobody called Stock spewing figments of his imagination mixed in with flat out lies and diversions from the main arguments.

"Suggesting that 730 mSv a year is OK for the Japanese, even though that is 3 times higher than the max career dose for nuke workers, who are paid for their risk"

The career dose limits are based on a faulty model, LNT and cumulative dose, both concepts are deeply immoral usage of scientific heritage. The real crime against humanity is the extreme double standard on nuclear energy. Air pollution kills around 7 million people a year. Air pollution from fossil plants, such as those as are needed to backup unreliable wind and solar generators that don't produce power most of the time. Even a so called renewable, biomass burning plant is allowed a million times the health risk of a nuclear plant. Plants love heavy metals, so biomass plants burn this and throw tons of carcinogenic and mutagenic heavy metals into the environment. Even the non heavy metal dust is carcinogenic (general PM2.5 etc.).

Next Stock continuous his diversionary tactics by focusing on the drinking water thing, which EP only brought up to show how incompetent Stock is. Even in that diversionary tactic, Stock has managed to embarrass himself by not seeing the difference between radium and radon. Those are elementary school errors.

All of this is just "more of the same" from Stock. It is getting wasteful of my time now.

And for your education, when a corium has burned on a concrete floor the amount of strontium volatalized increases dramtically. Since the source terms of cesium and strontium are effectively equal, there was a boatload more strontium released than in your run of the mill meltdown.

Cyril, good debunking. I'm getting some decent cites for my next little project (in the works for the last couple of weeks).

I'm archiving the log of comments on this post. No matter what Mr. Stock does henceforth, his embarrassing goofs will never be lost to the Internet. I'm sure he will be a great disappointment to his fossil-fuel employers.

FYI, Mr. Stock: to be anti-nuclear is objectively to be pro-coal. Amory Lovins himself promoted coal as a "temporary" alternative to nuclear power; we can see just how "temporary" that has been, as China alone has surpassed all other nations in coal consumption and CO2 emissions. Nuclear power is the only serious alternative to fossil fuels, providing dispatchable 24/7/365 energy equivalent to any carbon dug from the ground. As James Hansen himself says, the alternatives to fossil fuels are hydroelectric power and nuclear. There are no others at this time.

You may consider yourself defeated, but if you wish to continue to humiliate yourself in public, you are welcome to do so here. Whatever you post can and will be used as fodder to make fun of you, and everyone who takes you seriously.

So you don't care about radon in your water but you are hysterical about radium in your water. Very consistent of you, Stock.

"And for your education, when a corium has burned on a concrete floor the amount of strontium volatalized increases dramtically. Since the source terms of cesium and strontium are effectively equal, there was a boatload more strontium released than in your run of the mill meltdown. "

Another misleading half truth from Stock. When uranium dioxide fuel melts, a signficant fraction of the cesium is released - from the core. Into the containment. Where it instantly condenses on cold surfaces - boiling point 1650K @ 1 atm. In a pressurized containment, the condensation point is even higher, by hundreds of degrees at the containment ultimate pressure for example. So, the strontium settles inside the (to it) very cold containment, rather than escaping to the environment. Very different from cesium, which is so much more volatile than not everything condenses onto containment surfaces. It is also much more soluble so it will have a tendency to be entrained in high pressure wet steam (water droplets) and subsequently come out into the air, where it is washed out (due to solubility) by rain, causing land contamination. This is why cesium is the dominant land contaminator, and strontium is not important for reactors with containmnents (Chernobyl had no containment, not to mention terrorists for operators and an inherently unstable reactor).

@EP, hilarious! James Hansen 'himself'Another false argument appeal to authority. He is a CO2 pimp. This authoritative website shows that there is NO GLOBAL WARMING and that CO2 is not causitive of warming.

"Apparently little Cyril never saw the videos of all the explosions at Fuku, nor the covered up video of reactor 4 going off."

To assert whether your opponent has watched videos is not a rebuttal of arithmatic. It is yet another diversionary tactic. I hope you stop doing this diversion thing, it is really annoying. Really dishonest debate.

"Nor has she seen the EPA radiation in air density data showing that 100 tons of radiation was effectively aerosolized. "

The amount of radiocesium released by all the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan was 4 kg. Not 100000 kg. Once again, Stock exaggerates, this time not by a factor of 20 but by a factor of 25000. That is not a matter of precision anymore. Being off by a factor of twenty five thousand is hardly the sign of a professional.

The amount of radiostrontium released appears to be around 1/1000th the cesium, judging by the samples of contaminated soil and grass.

"Apparently she wants the blue pill "condensed" version of realityrather than the fact that there is NO containment at Fukuppy."

There is containment right now. Doesn't matter much since cooling and cleaning trains are operable, and decay heat levels are low so you don't need a containment. There was a mild failure (leak) due to overpressure at the time of the accident, but it occurred late enough to have enough time delay between core melting and containment failing, to have sufficient sticking of radionuclide to containment inner surfaces, plus suppression pool scrubbing. The containment mostly worked, between suppression pool scrubbing and surface sticking, radionuclide release was cut by an order of magnitude, though I admit it should have had passive cooling and passive hydrogen recombiners installed to get several orders of magnitude more reduction. That's TEPCO being irresponsible, not some inherent fault of nuclear technology that justifies Stock's burn-nuclear-anything-on-the-stake.

I wonder if Stock is opposed to people being healed by nuclear medicine. Perhaps Stock would prefer they die an agonizing death, all to avoid nuclear anything BANANA attitude of Stock.

"No indeed, being anti nuke is not pro coal. "

Uhm, wrong again. Has Stock even been right for once? No I think he actually hasn't!

Nuclear and coal work. There are a few regions lucky enough to have enough hydro, but for about 90% of the world, the choice is between nuclear and coal. Closing nuclear means getting more coal. Solar and wind are coal, they don't work reliably so you end up with more coal plants. This is what is happening in Germany for example. Natural gas is nice but needed elsewhere, such as in chemical and fertilizer production. Using it for power generation, especially in inefficient peakers for "backup" of unreliable wind and solar, is wasteful and insulting to future generations that want to use this clean fossil resource to make precious chemicals.

Yeah, right. If you believe that, I've got some oceanfront property in Arizona I'll cut you a deal on.

"I have discovered the scientific backing for why the Pacific food chain has been destroyed"

Fukushima, the Piltdown man of ecological catastrophes. Of course, the radiation-paranoid would never admit that ocean acidification such as is already dissolving coral in the Florida keys is a far better explanation for the troubles of sea life. It would mean that the anti-nukes have done more to push the world toward this disaster than almost anyone else, and actually saving the environment takes a back seat to them feeling good about themselves.